What’s dangerous in maligning we, however, is how badly I—a cisgender white man living in America—need to hear these voices. Often, the contemporary we is a backlash against centuries of a white cishet male monolith, which includes the we in the Constitution. It’s a backlash voiced by women, Black and Indigenous Americans, people of color, trans and nonbinary persons, and persons with disabilities. As Wesley Morris writes for The New York Times, “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginalized. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it.” Morris casts this moment as an inversion of the “culture wars” (so branded, but closer to cultural terrorism) of the eighties and nineties, when artists like Wojnarowicz faced censorship and humiliation from the religious right. After pushing their work to extremes and waging costly legal and political campaigns—including, in Wojnarowicz’s case, the very right to survive—the oppressed are now closer to power than ever. “This territory,” Morris writes, “was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any costs. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture.” It’s in this sense that we is linguistic action. We cosign or cancel speech, endorse or excoriate art, all the while presuming that any I can borrow any you. To say “we” amplifies our voices as one, an assumption of power.
I can’t speak for him, but having spent time with Wojnarowicz’s work, I get the impression that “we” is a power he’d have deeply distrusted. It’s something the marginalized, politically manipulated, and rhetorically violated would naturally distrust.
In most contemporary rhetoric, we is the leftist (or leftish) counterpart to the right’s fantasy of the “silent majority” (as if any of them could ever shut the fuck up). In Canetti’s terminology, it might function as a kind of “crowd crystal”—structures that “can be comprehended and taken in at a glance. Their unity is more important than their size.” It’s important that we see the crowd through this crystal and associate its power, its authority, accordingly—even if unearned or undeserved. As it concerns early twenty-first-century life, particularly in the United States, the pronoun is often visual shorthand for José Ortega y Gasset’s “masses”: “those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are . . . mere buoys that float on the waves.” The culture of the masses, as Ortega y Gasset wrote from Spain on the eve of civil war, “crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”
While Morris’s essay is sensitive and observant, and while I’m grateful to have read and reread it, my first impulse upon seeing its subheading (“Should art be a battleground for social justice?”) was to throw it across the room and tweet something like, “Do we really need another man whispering ‘art for art’s sake’ as he pins us against the wall?” This is what our experience of public life has done to me as a “marginalized” artist. I carry so much anger that even the threat of some man saying Let’s not get carried away triggers rage. Or perhaps more exact: revenge. I want to crush beneath our imagined moral homogeny what is different in Morris’s ideas—or any ideas I find immediately, triggeringly challenging, however excellent, individual, qualified, or select.
In the same way, I want to believe we need Wojnarowicz’s art. I want to prescribe it for us. But in truth I can only say that I need it: his juxtapositions, the shadows in his photographs, the narrative ambition of his paintings—exuberant perversions of renaissance epics. Close to the Knives, his “memoir of disintegration,” is a revelation in all ancient senses. Like many queers in the seventies, Wojnarowicz grew up neglected and abused, selling sex by the time he was fifteen so he could afford to eat. As an artist, he received no formal training—only critique from other artists, including Peter Hujar, whose ravaged body became one of Wojnarowicz’s most enduring subjects. Hujar’s face and hands and feet, photographed on his deathbed in 1987, found their way into a collage, lacquered over with a fiery indictment of the society that let this happen to a man he loved; and then Wojnarowicz, too, died, and with so much art left unmade.
Reading Wojnarowicz today—that is, as he once put it, “in a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president . . . a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them”—is invigorating. Art “can be reparatory,” Morris writes, “a means for the oppressed and ignored to speak,” and Wojnarowicz’s anger makes us feel, makes me feel, as if it’s my right to demand silence from those I perceive to have oppressed queer people, or even those who just don’t have the luck of being queer. I feel as if it’s my right to shun artworks in which I don’t recognize myself or my friends. To not see oneself mirrored in culture feels like abuse, every renewed act of erasure newly unbearable.
While Morris writes about art specifically, his essay reflects an overall tendency in this shattered culture toward separating, totally, that which we call bearable from that which we decide is not. This is the subject of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. “At many levels of human interaction,” she points out, “there is an opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” As social creatures, communication and negotiation are human responsibilities. Activities that work against communication—shunning, silencing, and enlisting the power of the state to punish rather than resolve—shirk this responsibility, and are unfortunately common among vulnerable persons, for whom withdrawal and refusal are often the only communication skills they possess. This leaves both parties trapped—one behind a locked door they won’t open, the other outside. Schulman describes her struggle to understand her colleagues, who, despite their progressive politics, have developed an “almost prescribed instinct to punish, using the language originated initially by a radical movement but now co-opted to deny complexity, due process, and the kind of in-person, interactive conversation that produces resolution.” This language is that of “abuse,” which has a perpetrator and a victim.
In situations of abuse (ask yourself: is this a power struggle or does this person have power over me?), victims are indeed blameless. But Schulman’s thesis outlines how what often feels like abuse is instead conflict—a point of pain in need of resolution, arrived at only through honest and open communication, which can, and often does, hurt: “the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion.” The state and its systems of power withhold assistance and compassion from those who are not “eligible.” This creates a system where the identity of victim is desired, if only to ensure one is met with compassion instead of derision. “This concept,” Schulman writes, “is predicated on a need to enforce that one party is entirely righteous and without mistake, while the other is the Specter, the residual holder of all evil.” Anyone who endured the punditry after the 2016 elections will understand why labeling oneself an economic or demographic victim can be toxic. In a sociological refusal to communicate, sixty-three million voters escalated decades of capitalist-driven conflict by turning their pain into a sacrosanct identity, regardless of how it would, and has, hurt millions of people far more severely than any pain, however legitimate, those voters felt.
As part of the totalizing mythography of personalities capitalism imposes upon living human beings, the outsized perception of abuse where there is only conflict is drawing a new kind of map, a new axis of personae. As more and more have or perceive real or simulated access to the civic and socioeconomic punishment apparatuses that govern who is and who is not us, our culture—from its politicians to its artists all the way down to its least val
ued of consumers—is charting a victimography: a system of social navigation where conflicts are permanent, where identities are fixed, and where agency is neutralized like never before.
Schulman’s ideas on conflict, communication, escalation, abuse, and repair encourage an individual acceptance of responsibility, however small, for as many of the conflicts in one’s life as possible. Yet it remains necessary to distinguish these conflicts from abuse. What’s interesting about Schulman’s essay is how it intersects with urgent questions of speech, de-platforming, and cancelation. Her insistence upon open and respectful communication seems like an inversion of the tactics of silence, shunning, exclusion, and sometimes of violence used by anti-fascist groups for decades to combat authoritarian politics. The strategies of anti-fascism seem to contradict everything Schulman says in her plea toward mutual understanding and conflict resolution, but only in the way that shouting over Ann Coulter, for example, seems like an infringement upon her right to incite violence through free speech.
The error here is to call fascism a conflict.
A primary goal of Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook is to illuminate the “trans-historical terror of fascism,” which is never a “defeated” enemy but a constant reactionary threat as long as inequality and suffering are tolerated. History is not fixed or written but being written. That post-Holocaust slogan—“Never again!”—is not a fact, observation, or conclusion, but a plea for understanding. As Bray writes, “History is a complex tapestry stitched together by threads of continuity and discontinuity . . . [Anti-fascism] is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” As evidenced by what’s happened in recent years in the United States, Brazil, India, and several countries in Europe, it could indeed happen again; and one needs to recognize it, contain it, and drive it back out of sight. These tactics don’t seek to understand the conflict and work toward resolution because there is no understanding, nor resolution; there is, in fact, no conflict. Fascism is abuse, and its evangelists know it. As Bray says, “The point here is not tactics; it is politics.” Just as an abusive parent or partner has no right to demand that his victim sit down and hear his case (again: “power over,” not “power struggle”), a political system that is predicated on the oppression and elimination of human beings from the populace based on race, legal history, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, or ability has no right to a national platform, and merits resistance over resolution. Fascism assumes a false mask of victimhood—one that seems like a politics in conflict—in order to undermine those who’d speak against it. But fascism is not a politics in conflict: it is a politics of abuse on a national and transnational scale. Anti-fascism seeks a way out of trauma; fascism governs with it.
Those sixty-three million votes: was each an act of abuse? I want to say yes. As Bray indicates, “It is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamophobia, and many more hateful traits.” For me and millions of others, these votes felt cruel, and while I’m no longer sure about calling each one abusive, I don’t question my choice to end every relationship I had with anyone who used that vote to inflict such irresponsible, widespread harm.
Supremacist ideologies don’t need that many fervent supporters; what they do need is indifference (including, in the case of the United States, an overwhelming nonvoting population). In the case of Trump voters, Bray writes, “it is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.”
Every fascist regime has snuck into power through legal means with a relatively small majority. In 1930, the Nazis received 18.3 percent of the vote. When Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Mussolini as prime minister in 1922, the PNF only held thirty-five of more than 500 seats. In 2016, Trump received over 2.8 million fewer votes than Clinton. As I write this, there are 31 states—plus D.C.—with party registration. In those states, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 12 million; yet Republicans control 61 of the 99 state legislative bodies and hold a majority in the Senate.
It’s hard to see class in America—to see poverty, for example, as an identity—because the American fabrication is that today’s poor, through obedience and hard work, will be rich tomorrow. It’s a story that hides, in plain sight, an oppressed class that serves as a ready-made voting base for the rich, as long as the rich grant them whiteness, heteronormativity, male supremacy, or some other power over those more deeply oppressed. They may not champion the oppression of others, but they do go along with it—or turn from the horror of it—as a price paid for a seat at the table.
It’s difficult to accept responsibility for this transaction, so enticing is its reward: state-sponsored victimhood. To take an example from Schulman, the white queer community doesn’t want to hear that today, “with gay marriage and parenthood prevalent, and the advent of gay nuclear families and normalized queer childbirth . . . white queer families realign with the state that held them in pervasive illegality less than a generation ago.” At the same time, this community still often sees itself as unable to do harm, so entrenched is its history with victimhood. To challenge this is perceived as antiqueer: of course we have the right to families, to suburbs, to lattes and plaid. But so, too, do white gays and lesbians, in their newfound positions of power, have newfound responsibility to uphold the greater community, and to use their privilege to resolve conflicts between the state and the trans community, between their neighbors and queers of color, not to mention other oppressed and persecuted communities, queer or not.
There is a similarity in refusal, Schulman says, in the supremacist and the victim: “For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent ‘right’ not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation.” For the conflicted, seeing their pain mirrored in another can become a way to justify pain: at least she feels what I feel, or even at least he’s worse off than me. What this creates is an ongoing and mutually reflective theater of trauma in which everyone is a victim, exempt from responsibility, beyond repair.
Like martyrs and monsters, the victim is a place, a container. Unlike martyrs and monsters, we know precisely how to get there. It takes unique and enormous efforts to arrive at martyrdom or monsterhood; yet, for most people, it’s easier than not to become a victim—though it’s generally a one-way trip. To leave would be to renounce one’s citizenship of victimhood, or Schulman’s “eligibility for compassion.”
All of these are, by design, dehumanizations. To confine anyone, in any sense, is an effort to dehumanize, but especially with regard to identity and agency. This is why, as Foucault suggested in the 1970s, even the criminal justice system has spent centuries morphing from a public display of violent punishment into a curio of isolated, neutralized victims—a criminological victimography. “The question is no longer simply: ‘Has the act been established and is it punishable?’ . . . A whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgements concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgement.” Foucault refers here to the expertise sought during our highly stylized, ritualistic trials—psychologists, forensic analysts, medical professionals, historians, all of whom are urged, directly and indirectly, to produce truths about the criminal or the act committed, and all of whom are, with respect to their expertise, themselves isolated and divided in their labors.
“The criminal’s soul,” Foucault adds, “is not referred to in the trial merely to explain his crime and as a factor in the juridical apportioning of responsibility . . . it is because it too, as well as the crime itself, is to be judged and to share in the punishment.” Under
monarchies, where a crime was an offense against the king, it was in the king’s interest to torture, dismember, brand, and otherwise spectacularly scar or destroy the criminal in a public capacity; his soul, in a sense, was eliminated. But under democracy, “Why would society eliminate a life and a body that it could appropriate?” Instead of becoming the king’s property, the democratically punished man “will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.” Through prosecutorial discipline, the criminal is made a victim of his crime; so guilty, he can no longer be trusted with his soul. “Through imprisonment, one has security for someone, one does not punish him . . . The duration of the penalty has meaning only in relation to possible correction, and to an economic use of the corrected criminal.” It’s for this reason that the poor are sentenced so much more severely—as are the Black, Indigenous, queer, brown, and so on. Or simply the vocal left, as the increasingly appalling penalties leveled against protestors have revealed. “Discipline,” Foucault concludes, “is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force.”
Another project of Foucault’s Discipline & Punish is to trace the juridical concern with assault, murder, and violence done to the person, to an obsession with “offences against property.” This was accelerated with the overt creation of “lower strata” and their “conditions of existence,” the illegality of which “was a perpetual factor in the increase of crime.” Whereas the destitute were once a charitable concern, the shift of illegality from person to property helped malign the poor as a “criminal class.”
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